Horticultural practices can be very disruptive to the natural biological balances that exist in nature, particularly insect and soil microbe balances. When the balance is disrupted, only the most robust and highly adaptive organisms tend to dominate. In most cases the new inhabitants are the unwanted pests and diseases. Due to the increasing environmental and social pressures being placed on horticulturalist to control pests and diseases more sustainably, chemical control options are becoming very unpopular. This has opened the door to the use of integrated pest management (IPM) practices and other biological control agent (BCA) options.

Today there is a wide range of commercially available predatory and parasitising insects that can be introduced into farming systems to control insects. There is also a range of bacteria and entomopathogenic fungi that have been developed for the purpose of insect control including Bacillus thuringiensis strains, B. subtilis strains,